s victors and enemies; and, in all their
transactions with him, paid no longer any regard to equity or reason. At
the instigation of the Independents and army, they neglected this offer,
and framed four proposals, which they sent him as preliminaries; and
before they would deign to treat, they demanded his positive assent to
all of them.

* The following was a favorite text among the enthusiasts of
that age: "Let the high praises of God be in the mouths of
his saints, and a twofold sword in their hands, to execute
vengeance upon the heathen and punishment upon the people;
to bind their kings with chains and their nobles with
fetters of iron; to execute upon them the judgments written:
This honor have all his saints." Psalm cxlix, ver. 6, 7, 8,
9. Hugh Peters, the mad chaplain of Cromwell, preached
frequently upon this text.

** Rush. vol. viii. p 880.

By one, he was required to invest the parliament with the military power
for twenty years, together with an authority to levy whatever money
should be necessary for exercising it; and even after the twenty years
should be elapsed, they reserved a right of resuming the same authority,
whenever they should declare the safety of the kingdom to require it.
By the second, he was to recall all his proclamations and declarations
against the parliament, and acknowledge that assembly to have taken arms
in their just and necessary defence. By the third, he was to annul all
the acts, and void all the patents of peerage, which had passed
the great seal since it had been carried from London by Lord Keeper
Littleton; and at the same time, renounce for the future the power of
making peers without consent of parliament. By the fourth, he gave the
two houses power to adjourn as they thought proper; a demand seemingly
of no great importance, but contrived by the Independents, that they
might be able to remove the parliament to places where it should remain
in perpetual subjection to the army.[*]

{1648.} The king regarded the pretension as unusual and exorbitant, that
he should make such concessions, while not secure of any settlement;
and should blindly trust his enemies for the conditions which they were
afterwards to grant him. He required, therefore, a personal treaty with
the parliament, and desired that all the terms on both sides should be
adjusted, before any concession on either side should be insisted on.
The republican party